Sunday, 30 March 2008

As expected, the proposed auction of a rare piece of body armour that experts believe belonged to Guru Gobind Singh in Sotheby's Arts of the Islamic World Sale has triggered condemnation from the Sikh community.

The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC), the highest temporal body of Sikhs, has urged the countrymen to oppose the auction of the relic of "the Guru who had stood like a rock in the face of attack by foreign invaders".

It has also exhorted the Sikh Diaspora to purchase the relic "since it carries the name of Guru Gobind Singh" and has asked the prime minister to intervene and stop the auction as it would amount to the violation of maryada .

Tuesday, 25 March 2008

Bulgaria will auction its Bobov Dol thermal power plant in three months, after two previous failed attempts to sell the outdated generator to a strategic investor, the privatization agency has announced.

Opening bid for the 420-megawatt, coal-fired plant in western Bulgaria is set at 100 million levs ($79.74 million).

The space suit patches from Buzz Aldrin's Gemini 12 space suit, presented by the astronaut to his parents as a Christmas gift in 1966, are estimated to sell for as much as $75,000 at a public auction today.

Aldrin's patches — given to his parents "with a grateful son's love," according to the inscription — are among the more expensive items available Tuesday at the Heritage Auction Galleries sale of air and space artifacts.

The priciest item looks like a dustpan with a foot-long aluminum handle. It's actually a scoop used by astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell to pick up moon dust on the 1971 Apollo 14 mission. Its estimated worth: as much as $300,000.

Other items being auctioned include an American flag that went to the moon's surface on the Apollo 14 mission, a pair of needle-nose pliers from Apollo 16 and a lunar chart used during Apollo 17.

"When one considers ... just how few actual objects have been off-planet, it's amazing to think that any of us would have the opportunity to actually own one of these incredibly rare pieces," said Tom Slater, director of Americana auctions for Heritage.

Slater said the space memorabilia have "impeccable provenance." More than 100 lots in the auction come directly from astronauts such as Aldrin, Charles Duke and Richard Gordon.

Thursday, 20 March 2008

The gun that shot Lee Harvey Oswald, and Marilyn Monroe's purse, were among items at an auction last week.

The man behind a 41,000-acre "green, eco-sustainable community" in south Osceola County decided to do a little housecleaning this weekend - by unloading the Wicked Witch's hat from The Wizard of Oz, the whip that Harrison Ford used as Indiana Jones and the gun that Jack Ruby used to shoot Harvey Oswald.

Those pieces, along with more than 800 other relics of 20th-century history, went on the auction block in Las Vegas on Saturday because their owner, eccentric South Florida developer Anthony Pugliese, decided to unload much of his pop-culture collection and focus on his new community.

More than 50 bidders gathered at the Palms Casino to bid on about 450 pieces of movie-related memorabilia, while most of the approximately 200 bidders joined the auction by telephone or on the Internet.

Though the crowd was small, the prices were high. Bidders drove up the price of the Wicked Witch's hat to $197,400. The holy grail that Ford sought in the film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade sold for $42,700, and bidders ran the price on Indiana Jones' bullwhip up to $70,150. Remember Odd Job from the James Bond movie Goldfinger? His famous bowler hat that could slice a statue in half sold for $134,200, said Arlan Ettinger of Guernsey's Auction House, the firm handling the auction.

Tuesday, 18 March 2008

The .38-calibre Colt Cobra revolver nightclub owner Jack Ruby used to shoot presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, up for auction in Las Vegas, got a bid for only a fraction of the owner's $1 million minimum asking price.

The gun, part of a weekend pop culture artifacts auction, drew a top bid of about $200,000. That's the same amount gun owner Anthony Pugliese III, a Florida real estate developer, paid for the weapon at a 1991 auction.

The Pugliese Pop Culture Collection, on the auction block Saturday and Sunday, includes about 150 items associated with President John F. Kennedy or his assassination in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

Auction house Guernsey's said the gun might be sold privately.

Ruby purchased the gun in 1960 for $62.50. He used it three years later to kill Oswald

Friday, 14 March 2008

In a visit to the Tate and Lyle factory this week, Her Majesty the Queen took time to visit resource-efficient social enterprise Auction My Stuff. Founder Chris Allwood was excited to meet Her Majesty, saying that it was an honour to meet her and explain more about what the enterprise does.

Sunday, 9 March 2008

A three-horned vegetarian dinosaur from North America has gone on display at a Paris auction house ahead of its sale next month along with the skull of a sabre-toothed tiger and giant shark teeth.

The skeleton of the 65-million-year-old Triceratops horridus (horrible three-horned face) is expected to fetch 500,000 euros (760,000 dollars) at the April 16 sale, said Christie's auctioneers.

It will be the first time such a dinosaur specimen has gone up for public sale since a T-Rex called Sue was sold in New York in 1997.

The four-legged herbivorous dinosaur, from a private European collection, is the highlight among the 150 objects at the April auction. It measures 7.5 metres (25 feet) in length and bears a large bony frill and three horns.

The triceratops' head alone weights about 200 kilos (440 pounds) while total body weight is about two tonnes.

The skeleton was found by a ranch owner in the US state of North Dakota and acquired in 2004 by a European buyer who wants to remain anonymous, said a Christie's spokesman.

"This specimen is the fourth most complete discovered so far," he said.

More than 70 percent of its bones are real, with the rest being copied in resin and added to the frame.

In all, 150 items from natural history collections -- fossils, skeletons and minerals -- valued at some 1.6 million euros will be up for auction.

The sabre-toothed tiger skull is expected to fetch up to 45,000 euros, while a set of fossilized giant shark teeth have been valued at up to 4,000 euros.

Christie's said it hoped to build on the success of last year's paleontology auction that brought in more than a million euros and established 12 world records.

Also up for bids will be a tyrannosaurus egg, mineralized in agate, valued at between 20,000 and 25,000 euros; and an apatosaurus dinosaur tibia from the Jurassic Period, which is expected to raise up to 30,000 euros.

A private German museum is offering a well-conserved cranium of an edmontosaurus, a duck-beaked dinosaur, estimated at between 70,000 and 80,000 euros.

Mineral specimens are also expected to draw interest, including six Condor agates and a 400-kilo copper leaf discovered in the US state of Michigan, which is estimated at between 30,000 and 35,000 euros.

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WELCOME to the AUCTIONEER. Auctioneering is one of the passions of my life. I hope to post bits and pieces of interesting news on auctions and auctioneering which I come across while trawling the web, as well as my own experiences.

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I am also a freelance auctioneer and ALWAYS interested in work. I have conducted over 2,000 auctions. While my speciality is in Collector's Items and Antiques, I have conducted auctions of property, cars, cattle, lettings, gold, tack, computers as well as charity auctions. Have appeared on several TV programs.